Obama Should Be Impeached... for Cluelessness

When I read Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama was "unaware" until last summer that the U. S. spied on thirty-five world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I was frankly stupefied. (Well, maybe not entirely stupefied, but at least semi-stunned.)

No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels.

What exactly does our president do for a living? What're we paying him for?

Either the administration officials who leaked this information to the WSJ are lying or Barack Obama should be impeached.

Forget "high crimes and misdemeanors." For those you have to do something and be conscious. Barack Obama should be impeached for cluelessness.

He was in the White House for an entire term and many months more without knowing what his biggest intelligence agency was doing to thirty-five of the most important people on Earth? Chance the Gardener from Jerzy Kosinki's Being There lives -- and he lives on Pennsylvania Avenue at our expense. It's not fiction anymore. (Well, there is one difference. Chance was kind of sweet and passive while Obama is vindictive.)

From the WSJ:

The National Security Agency ended a program used to spy on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a number of other world leaders after an internal Obama administration review started this summer revealed to the White House the existence of the operations, U.S. officials said.

Officials said the internal review turned up NSA monitoring of some 35 world leaders, in the U.S. government's first public acknowledgment that the U.S. government tapped the phones of world leaders. European leaders have joined international outrage over revelations of U.S. surveillance of Ms. Merkel's phone and of NSA's monitoring of telephone call data in France.

The White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, including the one tracking Ms. Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior U.S. official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but haven't been phased out completely yet, officials said.

The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

[itals mine]

Not practical to brief him on spying on Angela Merkel, et al? Do you believe that? If it's true, it's worse. The president is so incurious he might as well be playing golf all the time.